Opposite Reaction Quotes

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You receive from the world what you give to the world.

I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

and to every action there is always an equal and opposite or contrary, reaction

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You never know what it’s going to look like on the other side, but you’ll see it eventually if you keep your eyes open.

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In Revenge, as in life, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the end the guilty always fall.

Maybe I’d already guessed that the physics of us didn’t defy any laws of gravity, and with her, there was always an equal and opposite reaction.

with every action theres an equal opposite reaction. With every problem, there’s a solution: just a matter of taking action.

After every unladylike action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Consider the necessary, analyze the consequences, clean up the mess.

Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.

The point is, sometimes dislike is a gut reaction. Like falling in love at first sight, you know? Just . . . the opposite.

Because everything is interdependent, there are no simple, single causes and effects. Every action creates not just an equal and opposite reaction, but a web of reverberating consequences.

we all collide. It made him think of Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It was like, when you collided with someone, they would not be in the same position as they used to be. Everyone equally affected one another.

It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means.

How cruel, that sharing someone else's grief did nothing to alleviate it for them. In physics, there were rules and forces, equal and opposite reactions, a balance. But emotions didn’t obey rules, and though sympathy settled over her like a blanket, it did nothing to help him. … Even her hands, which stole power, strength, and life itself. Were powerless to siphon off any of his suffering.

The Girlfriend 911 Proven Program: 1) How to stop making decisions based on the fear of being alone 
 2) How to set standards and boundaries and avoid being taken for granted 3)How your “Smartphone” can lead to not-so-smart relationship decisions 4)How your actions can actually cause the opposite reaction you’re hoping for 5)How to spell out exactly what you want from the relationship 6)How to really deal with a man who can’t commit – without compromise

Scientists say every action initiates an equal and opposite reaction. I say that's just the start. I say every action initiates a most unequal and upredictable chain reaction, that every filament of living becomes part of a larger weave, while remaining identifiable. That every line of latitude requires several stripes of longitude to obtain meaning. That every universe is part of a bigger heaven, a heaven of rhythm and geometry, where a heartbeat is the apex of a triangle.

Love should be according to Newton's third law that states: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Suicide rates have not slumped under the onslaught of antidepressants, mood-stabilizers, anxiolytic and anti-psychotic drugs; the jump in suicide rates suggests that the opposite is true. In some cases, suicide risk skyrockets once treatment begins (the patient may feel not only penalized for a justifiable reaction, but permanently stigmatized as malfunctioning). Studies show that self-loathing sharply decreases only in the course of cognitive-behavioral treatment.

If you both agree that the relationship will be your spiritual practice, so much the better. You can then express your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not create a time gap in which an unexpressed or unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow. Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present. Accusing, defending, attacking — all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met will then become redundant. Giving space to others — and to yourself — is vital. Love cannot flourish without it. When you have removed the two factors that are destructive to relationships — when the pain-body has been transmuted and you are no longer identified with mind and mental positions — and if your partner has done the same, you will experience the bliss of the flowering of relationship. Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your unconsciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive ego needs, you will reflect back to each other the love that you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no opposite.

the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.

The nearer Christ comes to a heart, the more it becomes conscious of its guilt; it will then either ask for his mercy and find peace, or else it will turn against Him because it is not yet ready to give up its sinfulness. Thus He will separate the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff. Man's reaction to this Divine Presence will be the test: either it will call out all the opposition of egotistic natures, or else galvanize them into a regeneration and a resurrection.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Forces always come in pairs.

Because the actor always moves among and in relation to other acting beings, he is never merely a "doer" but always and at the same time a sufferer. To do and to suffer are like opposite sides of the same coin, and the story that an act starts is composed of its consequent deeds and sufferings. These consequences are boundless, because action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes

Another thing is war. I am naturally warlike. Attacking is one of my instincts. Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy — these require a strong nature, perhaps; in any case every strong nature presupposes them. It needs resistances, so it seeks resistance: aggressive pathos is just as integrally necessary to strength as the feeling of revenge and reaction is to weakness. Woman, forinstance, is vengeful: that is a condition of her weakness, as is her sensitivity to other people’s afflictions. — The strength of anattacker can in a way be gauged by the opposition he requires; allgrowth makes itself manifest by searching out a more powerful opponent — or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike challenges problems to duels, too. The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one’s entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms — opponents who are equal...

it’s like the laws of physics—for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. If you go into darkness, the darkness goes into you. You then have to decide what to do with it. How to keep yourself safe from it. How to keep it from hollowing you out.

Love is hard to offend and quick to forgive. How easily do you get irritated and offended? Some people live by the motto, “Never pass up an opportunity to get upset with your spouse.” When something goes wrong, they quickly take full advantage of it by expressing how hurt or frustrated they are. But this is the opposite reaction of love.

Dr. Fuselier had the opposite reaction. Insanity was marked by mental confusion. Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation. Fuselier ticked off Eric’s personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy. It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.

Sorry’ is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most powerful words in the English language, provided one can feel and say it at the same time. It’s difficult because you sincerely need to feel the pain of the other person and rise above your ego to say it; it’s powerful because you overwhelm the other with the opposite reaction of what they were expecting.

do unto others as you would've them do unto you. scientific prove that to be a fact for every action is the opposite as equal reaction. Don't fuck with me, and i won't fuck with you

Actually, when bad things happen to us, we tend to have three unfortunate reactions: self-criticism, self-isolation, and self-absorption. Neff’s three components of self-compassion direct us exactly in the opposite direction: self-kindness, recognizing the common humanity in our experience, and a balanced approach to negative emotions.

Claire dropped Willie on the cobbles and caught the girl by the back of her combies as she spun to escape. It was the work of a moment to turn her over her knee and remind her of Newton’s law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

For every action.... There is an equal and opposite reaction... Too Bad for anyone stuck in the middle!

In markets, stupid action does not have equal but severe opposite reaction.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

When I went on my first antidepressant it had the side effect of making me fixated on suicide (which is sort of the opposite of what you want). It’s a rare side effect so I switched to something else that did work. Lots of concerned friends and family felt that the first medication’s failure was a clear sign that drugs were not the answer; if they were I would have been fixed. Clearly I wasn’t as sick as I said I was if the medication didn’t work for me. And that sort of makes sense, because when you have cancer the doctor gives you the best medicine and if it doesn’t shrink the tumor immediately then that’s a pretty clear sign you were just faking it for attention. I mean, cancer is a serious, often fatal disease we’ve spent billions of dollars studying and treating so obviously a patient would never have to try multiple drugs, surgeries, radiation, etc., to find what will work specifically for them. And once the cancer sufferer is in remission they’re set for life because once they’ve learned how to not have cancer they should be good. And if they let themselves get cancer again they can just do whatever they did last time. Once you find the right cancer medication you’re pretty much immune from that disease forever. And if you get it again it’s probably just a reaction to too much gluten or not praying correctly. Righ

If the muscles delivered enough force to bust the bones of prey, they could have also broken the skull bones of the T. rex itself. Basic physics: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So it wasn’t enough for T. rex to have massive teeth and huge jaw muscles—it also needed a skull that could withstand the tremendous stresses that occurred each time it snapped its jaws shut.

Given how tedious and dull the hospital could be, I always expected hospital inpatients to be happy to see us. But they frequently had the opposite reaction. Patients cringed as soon as the door swung open to reveal, ta da! Physical Therapy!

For every Gospel action, there is an opposite and devious demonic reaction. We see this in the book of Acts. It appears in church history. We experience it in our personal journeys.

We have to accept that any action we take might promote an equal and opposite reaction that we do not want. We have to realize that even the most noble actions or most obviously correct course can have its dark side that we cannot control or reason our way out of. The fighter of the "just war" must understand that her actions will result in the deaths of other humans; many of whom may be innocent. The pacifist who refuses all war must realize that his inaction might likewise result in the deaths of the innocent. There are no actions without contradiction—and yet we must act, for not to act is also a contradictory action with both positive and negative effects.

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It’s easy. And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.… …In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers. These are facts you find out later, though. Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can’t be discounted. Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

A man unknowingly hurts his partner by speaking in an uncaring manner and then goes on to explain why she should not be upset. He mistakenly assumes she is resisting the content of his point of view, when really his unloving delivery is what upsets her. Because he does not understand her reaction, he focuses more on explaining the merit of what he is saying instead of correcting the way he is saying it. He has no idea that he is starting an argument; he thinks she is arguing with him. He defends his point of view while she defends herself from his sharpened expressions, which are hurtful to her.

The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one loses one's familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth. It takes astonishing strength to transform this reaction into its opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment. (p.58)

Sorry’ is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most powerful words in the English language, provided one can feel and say it at the same time. It’s difficult because you sincerely need to feel the pain of the other person and rise above your ego to say it; it’s powerful because you overwhelm the other with the opposite reaction of what they were expecting.

-There must be balance. Action and reaction. Chaos and order. Death and life.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." -Isaac Newton, 1686 from Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis

When you smile at someone, the person smiles back. According to Newton’s third law of motion, ‘to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

That was the problem with associating with criminals. It led to Newtonian espionage. Each action produced an equal and opposite reaction and you couldn’t use without being used in turn.

Your sense of paralysis will be intensified if your family and friends are in the habit of pushing and cajoling you. Their nagging should statements reinforce the insulting thoughts already echoing through your head. Why is their pushy approach doomed to failure? It's a basic law of physics that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. Any time you feel shoved, whether by someone's hand actually on your chest or by someone trying to boss you around, you will naturally tighten up and resist so as to maintain your equilibrium and balance. You will attempt to exert your self-control and preserve your dignity by refusing to do the thing that you are being pushed to do. The paradox is that you often end up hurting yourself.

We should realize that if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art, it can be far more devastating than if it is expressed in poor art. The greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and it's worldview under the judgment of Christ and the Bible. The common reaction among many however, is just the opposite. Ordinarily, many seem to feel that the greater the art, the less we ought to be critical of its worldview. This we must reverse.

With his last breath, her son had said, “Oh, Mom, it’s so simple.” I believe we make our paths far more difficult than they need to be. Our struggle with and resistance to what is entangles us in constant chaos and frustration—when it’s all so simple. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And remember Newton’s third law of motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The energy you create and release into the world will be reciprocated on all levels. Our main job in life is to align with the energy that is the source of all energies, and to keep our frequency tuned to the energy of love. This I know for sure. When that is your life’s work, mystery solved—or at least, the mystery no longer mystifies you. It only heightens the rapture, reverence, and grace.

A poem by Rudyard Kipling says derisively of people who despise soldiers and police that they make ‘mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep.’ You are likely to have a strong reaction pro or con to this sentiment and how Kipling expressed it, but you will not be able to defend your view with arguments that would convince someone who has the opposite reaction. If you are intellectually sophisticated you mare recognize that your conviction, however strong, cannot be shown to be ‘right,’ but at most reasonable. Yet that recognition will not weaken the strength of your conviction or its influence on your behavior.” 105-06 (quoting Rudyard Kipling, Tommy.)

The air currents should take you to the wall in, I don’t know, ten minutes or so, but if you’re really in a hurry, take off your clothes and throw them away from you; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain. Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more. The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter. Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community. I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

I tend to imagine the self-regulating system like little gremlins hoping on the pain side of the balance to counteract the weight on the pleasure side. The gremlins represent the work of homeostasis, the tendency of any living system to maintain physiologic equilibrium. Once the balance is level, it keeps going, tipping an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. In the 1970s social scientists Richard Solomon and John Corbett called this reciprocal relationship between pleasure and pain "The Opponent Process Theory". Any prolonged or repeated departure from hedonic or adaptive neutrality has a cost. That cost is an after-reaction, that is opposite in value to the stimulus, or as the old saying goes: "What goes up, must come down".

The only permissible judgment in polite society is that no judgment is permissible. A century-long reaction against Victorian prudery, repression, and hypocrisy, led by intellectuals who mistook their personal problems for those of society as a whole, has created this confusion. It is as though these intellectuals were constantly on the run from their stern, unbending, and joyless forefathers—and as if they took as an unfailing guide to wise conduct either the opposite of what their forefathers said and did, or what would have caused them most offence, had they been able even to conceive of the possibility of such conduct.

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. In the law of physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

Equally widespread is the opposite doctrine of an “eternal antisemitism” in which Jew-hatred is a normal and natural reaction to which history gives only more or less opportunity. Outbursts need no special explanation because they are natural consequences of an eternal problem. That this doctrine was adopted by professional antisemites is a matter of course; it gives the best possible alibi for all horrors. If

One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge.

When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person’s position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won’t turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. “No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict,” states A Course in Miracles. This refers not only to conflict with other people but more fundamentally to conflict within you, which ceases when there is no longer any clash between the demands and expectations of your mind and what is.

The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For optimists, this fact plays no part in their existential computations. For pessimists, however, it is axiomatic. Whether a pessimist urges us to live “heroically” with a knife in our gut or denounces life as not worth living is immaterial. What matters is that he makes no bones about hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy to observe. But this problem can be solved only by establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that would enable us in principle to say which is more desirable—existence or nonexistence. While no airtight case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of human life, pessimists still run themselves ragged trying to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When they do argue for the desirability of human life it is only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even though no airtight case has ever been made regarding that desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

But the unconscious is also feared by those whose conscious attitude is at odds with their true nature. Naturally their dreams will then assume an unpleasant and threatening form, for if nature is violated she takes her revenge. In itself the unconscious is neutral, and its normal function is to compensate the conscious position. In it the opposites slumber side by side; they are wrenched apart only by the activity of the conscious mind, and the more one-sided and cramped the conscious standpoint is, the more painful or dangerous will be the unconscious reaction. There

As I pondered the dynamics of love, Newton’s laws and equations came to mind. It was an unusual connection, but suddenly the concept of love made sense through the lens of physics. It occurred to me that when two people connect, their interactions are subject to the same fundamental laws that govern physical objects. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, as described by Newton’s Third Law of Motion. This was the basis of physics, and human behavior seemed to follow the same pattern. If one person makes a choice, the other will respond with an equal and opposite reaction.

Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it is more engaging if seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemistry without giving in to some sort of randy anthromorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges; repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules really want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little gentle flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there.

It often happens that opposite emotions trigger similar reactions in the human body, for crying occurs both in moments of deep despair and great joy. Only observant poets know the difference, for despair paints the eyes red and causes swelling, while joy makes them glitter like emeralds under the brightest of suns.

That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

An anticathexis of this kind is clearly seen in obsessional neurosis. It appears there in the form of an alteration of the ego, as a reaction-formation in the ego, and is effected by the reinforcement of the attitude which is the opposite of the instinctual trend that has to be repressed—as, for instance, in pity, conscientiousness and cleanliness.

The point is, sometimes dislike is a gut reaction. Like falling in love at first sight, you know? Just... the opposite.

The opposite of contemplation is not action, it is reaction.

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his work "junk", simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this even if we differ with his worldview... Yet where his work shows his worldview, it must be judged by its relationship to the Christian worldview. If we stand as Christians before a man's canvas and recognize that he is a great artist in technical excellence, we have been fair with him as a man. Then we can say that his worldview is wrong. We can judge his views on the same basis as we judge anybody else- philosopher, common man, laborer, business man, or whatever. God's Word binds the great man and the small, the scientist and the simple, the king and the artist. We should realize that if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art, it can be far more devastating than if it is expressed in poor art. The greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and it's worldview under the judgment of Christ and the Bible. The common reaction among many however, is just the opposite. Ordinarily, many seem to feel that the greater the art, the less we ought to be critical of its worldview. This we must reverse.

Those five characteristics are:    1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.    2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.    3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.    4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.    5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four. To reorient oneself away from a focus on technology toward a focus on emotional process requires that, like Columbus, we think in ways that not only are different from traditional routes but that also sometimes go in the opposite direction. This chapter will thus also serve as prelude to the three that follow, which describe the “equators” we have to cross in our time: the “learned” fallacies or emotional barriers that keep an Old World orientation in place and cause both family and institutional leaders to regress rather than venture in new directions.

Do I need to check up on you guys later? You know the rules.No sleeping in opposite-sex rooms." My face flames,and St. Clair's cheeks grow blotchy. It's true.It's a rule. One that my brain-my rule-loving, rule-abiding brain-conveniently blocked last night. It's also one notoriously ignored by the staff. "No,Nate," we say. He shakes his shaved head and goes back in his apartment. But the door opens quickly again,and a handful of something is thrown at us before it's slammed back shut. Condoms.Oh my God, how humiliating. St. Clair's entire face is now bright red as he picks the tiny silver squares off the floor and stuffs them into his coat pockets. We don't speak,don't even look at each other,as we climb the stairs to my floor. My pulse quickens with each step.Will he follow me to my room,or has Nate ruined any chance of that? We reach the landing,and St. Clair scratches his head. "Er..." "So..." "I'm going to get dressed for bed. Is that all right?" His voice is serious,and he watches my reaction carefully. "Yeah.Me too.I'm going to...get ready for bed,too." "See you in a minute?" I swell with relief. "Up there or down here?" "Trust me,you don't want to sleep in my bed." He laughs,and I have to turn my face away,because I do,holy crap do I ever. But I know what he means.It's true my bed is cleaner. I hurry to my room and throw on the strawberry pajamas and an Atlanta Film Festival shirt. It's not like I plan on seducing him. Like I'd even know how. St. Clair knocks a few minutes later, and he's wearing his white bottoms with the blue stripes again and a black T-shirt with a logo I recognize as the French band he was listening to earlier. I'm having trouble breathing. "Room service," he says. My mind goes...blank. "Ha ha," I say weakly. He smiles and turns off the light. We climb into bed,and it's absolutely positively completely awkward. As usual. I roll over to my edge of the bed. Both of us are stiff and straight, careful not to touch the other person. I must be a masochist to keep putting myself in these situations. I need help. I need to see a shrink or be locked in a padded cell or straitjacketed or something. After what feels like an eternity,St. Clair exhales loudly and shifts. His leg bumps into mine, and I flinch. "Sorry," he says. "It's okay." "..." "..." "Anna?" "Yeah?" "Thanks for letting me sleep here again. Last night..." The pressure inside my chest is torturous. What? What what what? "I haven't slept that well in ages." The room is silent.After a moment, I roll back over. I slowly, slowly stretch out my leg until my foot brushes his ankle. His intake of breath is sharp. And then I smile,because I know he can't see my expression through the darkness.

We are all regularly presented, day after day, with bad news, the worst, and I think our minds are more and more set into attitudes of foreboding and depression. But is it possible that all the bad things going on – and I don’t have to list them, for we all know what they are – are a reaction, a dragging undertow, to a forward movement in the human social evolution that we can’t easily see? Perhaps, looking back, let’s say in a century or two centuries, is it possible people will say, ‘That was a time when extremes battled for supremacy. The human mind was developing very fast in the direction of self-knowledge, self-command, and as always happens, as always has to happen, this thrust forward aroused its opposite, the forces of stupidity, brutality, mob thinking’? I think it is possible. I think that this is what is happening.

Anybody who has done high school physics knows Newton’s Third Law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You push against a wall; it pushes back against you. I love the poetry hidden in these truths, in the many laws we’ve discovered that underpin the universal fabric. We search for meaning ever hungrier, perhaps even with desperation: the symmetry in the equations freaks us out; for all we know, there is just us on this lonely little marble in the inky void.

In the woodblock prints of the Genroku period one often finds the features of a pair of lovers to be surprisingly similar, with little to distinguish the man from the woman. The universal ideal of beauty in Greek sculpture likewise approaches a close resemblance between the male and female. Might this not be one of the secrets of love? Might it not be that through the innermost recesses of love there courses an unattainable longing in which both the man and the woman desire to become the exact image of the other? Might not this longing drive them on, leading at last to a tragic reaction in which they seek to attain the impossible by going to the opposite extreme? In short, since their mutual love cannot achieve a perfection of mutual identity, is there not a mental process whereby each of them tries instead to emphasize their points of dissimilarity—the man his manliness and the woman her womanliness—and uses this very revolt as a form of coquetry toward the other? Or if they do achieve a similarity, it unfortunately lasts for only a fleeting moment of illusion. Because, as the girl becomes more bold and the boy more shy, there comes an instant at which they pass each other going in opposite directions, overshooting their mark and passing on beyond to some point where the mark no longer exists.

Suppose you are chilling somewhere and see a diamond a few meters away on your right side. Your mind’s first reaction would be, “That must be a piece of glass, not diamond.” Now, on your left side a few meters away you spot an unknown object towards which 2 people are running from opposite side. Your mind’s reaction would be, “If two people are running towards that object, it must be something precious. Run and grab it before they do.” Often, our mind makes us compete with others over peanuts while the diamond which is meant for us lies unattended.

In the middle of the night, he woke up and realized to his surprise that he had been having one erotic dream after the other. The only one he could recall with any clarity was the last: an enormous naked woman, at least five times his size, floating on her back in a pool, her belly from crotch to navel covered with thick hair. Looking at her from the side of the pool, he was greatly excited. How could he have been excited when his body was debilitated by a gastric disorder? And how could he be excited by the sight of a woman who would have repelled him had he seen her while conscious? He thought: In the clockwork of the head, two cogwheels turn opposite each other. On the one, images; on the other, the body's reactions. The cog carrying the image of a naked woman meshes with the corresponding erection-command cog. But when, for one reason or another, the wheels go out of phase and the excitement cog meshes with a cog bearing the image of a swallow in flight, the penis rises at the sight of a swallow. Moreover, a study by one of Tomas's colleagues, a specialist in human sleep, claimed that during any kind of dream men have erections, which means that the link between erections and naked women is only one of a thousand ways the Creator can set the clockwork moving in a man's head. And what has love in common with all this? Nothing. If a cogwheel in Tomas's head goes out of phase and he is excited by seeing a swallow, it has absolutely no effect on his love for Tereza. If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es muss sein! Though that is not entirely true. Even if love is something other than a clockwork of sex that the Creator uses for His own amusement, it is still attached to it. It is attached to it like a tender naked woman to the pendulum of an enormous clock. Thomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had. He also thought: One way of saving love from the stupidity of sex would be to set the clockwork in our head in such a way as to excite us at the sight of a swallow. And with that sweet thought he started dozing off. But on the very threshold of sleep, in the no-man's-land of muddled concepts, he was suddenly certain he had just discovered the solution to all riddles, the key to all mysteries, a new utopia, a paradise: a world where man is excited by seeing a swallow and Tomas can love Tereza without being disturbed by the aggressive stupidity of sex.

A mood of outrage and defiance swept the South, not unlike the reaction to emancipation and Reconstruction following the Civil War. Again, racial equality was being forced upon the South by the federal government, and by 1956 Southern white opposition to desegregation mushroomed into a vicious backlash.

Alexander's succeeding campaigns, until he reached the borders of India, were militarily a 'mopping up' of the Persian empire, while politically the consolidation of his own. He forced the Uxian defile and the Persian 'Gates' by an indirect approach, and when he was confronted on the Hydaspes by Porus, he produced a masterpiece of indirectness which showed the ripening of his own strategical powers. By laying in stores of corn, and by distributing his army widely along the western bank, he mystified his opponent as to his intentions. Repeated noisy marches and counter-marches of Alexander's cavalry first kept Porus on tenterhooks, and then, through repetition, dulled his reaction. Having thus fixed Porus to a definite and static position, Alexander left the bulk of his army opposite it, and himself with a picked force made a night crossing eighteen miles upstream. By the surprise of this indirect approach he dislocated the mental and moral balance of Porus, as well as the moral and physical balance of this army. In the ensuing battle Alexander, with a fraction of his own army, was enabled to defeat almost the whole of his enemy's. If this preliminary dislocation had not occurred there would have been no justification, either in theory or in fact, for Alexander's exposure of an isolated fraction to the risk of defeat in detail.

The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy—the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.

If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man's ideals that change; it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, "You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older," says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect.

But a windbreak is also a great teacher, for me, about nonviolence. How do we respond to strong forces—anger, rage, even physical attack—without becoming violent in return? How do we respond to what might be well-meant but harsh criticism (whether well intentioned or intentionally hurtful)? If we become a wall, shutting out the energies coming at us, we may actually strengthen the anger of the opposition. On the other hand, if we simply brush off or bat away criticism, the opposition may expand its criticism to include our reactions. But there’s a third alternative: if we can learn from the trees, we can take in and transform the energy coming at us. We do this by staying calm and grounded and centered, by listening rather than responding, by swaying with the wind and letting it blow itself out.

It had been a long time since a woman had aroused his interest as Amelia Hathaway had. The moment he had seen her standing in the alley, wholesome and pink-cheeked, her voluptuous figure contained in a modest gown, he had wanted her. He had no idea why, when she was the embodiment of everything that annoyed him about Englishwomen. It was obvious Miss Hathaway had a relentless certainty in her own ability to organize and manage everything around her. Cam’s usual reaction to that sort of female was to flee in the opposite direction. But as he had stared into her pretty blue eyes, and seen the tiny determined frown hitched between them, he had felt an unholy urge to snatch her up and carry her away somewhere and do something uncivilized. Barbaric, even. Of course, uncivilized urges had always lurked a bit too close to his surface.

There were two reactions to rape, from a psychological standpoint, based on the perceptions of men and their reactions. One, the Madonna Complex, where the victim refuses to have sexual relations and may even find more comfort with the opposite sex of the one who’d hurt them. Two, the Whore Complex, where they sleep with anyone, be it because they need that sort of validation or because a part of them craved what had been done

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

There is great danger in this Golden Mean, one of whose main objects is to steer clear of shipwreck, Scylla being as fatal as Charybdis. No, this lofty and equable attitude is worse than wrong unless it derives from striking the balance between two very distant opposites. One of the worst perils of the present time is that, in the reaction against ignorant bigotry, people no longer dare to make up their minds about anything. The very practice, which the A∴A∴ so strongly and persistently advocates, tends to make people feel that any positive attitude or gesture is certainly wrong, whatever may be right. They forget that the opposite may, within the limit of the universe of discourse, amount to nothing. [....] Of course, in no case does the Golden Mean advise hesitating, trimming, hedging, compromising; the very object of ensuring an exact balance in your weapon is that its blow may be clean and certain.

I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people [people at Tea Party rallies, ed]. It's never been just political, it's personal. I'm not convinced anyone in this country except the kinds of weenies who thought student council was important really cares about large versus small government or strict constructionalism versus judicial activism. The ostensible issues are just code words in an ugly snarl of class resentment, anti-intellectualism, old-school snobbery, racism, and who knows what else - grudges left over from the Civil War, the sixties, gym class. The Tea Party likes to cite a poll showing that their members are wealthier and better educated than te general populace, but to me they mostly looked like the same people I'd had to listen to in countless dive bars railing against "edjumicated idiots" and explaining exactly how Nostradamus predicted 9/11, the very people I and everyone I know fled our hometowns to get away from. So far all my interactions at the rally were only reinforcing my private theory - I suppose you might call it a prejudice - that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It's the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also account for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized - Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just di further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo.

After all, the opposite of contemplation is not action but reaction. It’s not a life that is active—doing good in the world, working hard, serving those in need. That’s exactly what you would expect to come from a life of abiding: fruit. The opposite of contemplation is a life that is reactive—getting sucked into the tyranny of the urgent instead of the important, chasing the latest fad, wasting our fleeting lives climbing some illusory corporate ladder, hurrying from one distraction to the next…

[When asked about the dangers of Internet trolls being able to say whatever they want because of false profiles] What interests me (if you ask me) in phenomenon – not only Facebook, but generally, this, let's call them 'staged identities' [...] – is how there can be more truth in the mask that you adopt than in your real, inner self. I always believed in masks; I never believed in the emancipatory potential of this gesture of 'let's tear off the masks.' [...] Let me give you a simple example. Let us say that I'm in reality a shy, impotent, stupid person, afraid...but then, in Internet reaction, I adopt a screen persona of a brutal, racist guy who humiliates people, beats women and so on...It's too easy to say, 'Oh, I'm really a coward, but there I imagined to be a powerful macho.' What if it's the opposite? What if I really am that brutal guy – but in real life, because of social pressure and so on, I oppress it...so that the true mask is my authentic, real self? And the truth comes out precisely in the guise of a fiction.

I’ve learned this deeply from friends and leaders in the black community. Previously unaware of systemic injustice, my implicit bias, and my knee-jerk reaction to black pain or outrage, I’ve since discovered that “Yeah, but . . .” or “Well, I’m not . . .” or “Okay, but what about . . .” or “No, it didn’t . . .” is the opposite of love. Love means saying to someone else’s story or pain or anger or experience: “I’m listening. Tell me more.” Love refuses to deny or dismantle another’s perspective simply because I don’t share it. At its core, love means caring more

Etymologically, "compassion" means to suffer together. "Together," however, is different from "identically." Compassion is not the same as selflessness, and not really the opposite of selfishness. Rather, it provides a basis for helping other people that is materially disinterested but emotionally self-regarding. As Rousseau wrote in Emile, "When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself..." Or, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, "Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.

This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever—any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is “good” or “bad”—every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it,” and what follows is a rationalisation. But “I like this book” is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.” Of course, when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission.

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve.” There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal faith in progress which inspired the nineteenth century was itself a substitute for the simpler and more positive religious faith which was the vital bond of the Western community. If we wish to understand our past and the inheritance of Western culture, we have to go behind the nineteenth century development and study the old spiritual community of Western Christendom as an objective historical reality.

One has but to consider the phenomenon of fashion, which has never been satisfactorily explained. Fashion is the despair of sociology and aesthetics: a prodigious contagion of forms in which chain reactions struggle for supremacy over the logic of distinctions. The pleasure of fashion is undeniably cultural in origin, but does it not stem even more clearly from a flaring, unmediated consensus generated by the interplay of signs? Moreover, fashions fade away like epidemics once they have ravaged the imagination, once the virus has run its course. The price to be paid in terms of waste is always exorbitant, yet everyone consents. The marvellous in our societies resides in this ultra-rapid circulation of signs at a surface level (as opposed to the ultra-slow circulation of meanings). We love being contaminated by this process, and not having to think about it. This is a viral onslaught as noxious as the plague, yet no moral sociology, no philosophical reason, will ever extirpate it. Fashion is an irreducible phenomenon because it partakes of a crazy, viral, mediationless form of communication which operates so fast for the sole reason that it never passes via the mediation of meaning. Anything that bypasses mediation is a source of pleasure. In seduction there is a movement from the one to the other which does not pass via the same. (In cloning, it is the opposite: the movement is from the same to the same without passage via the other; and cloning holds great fascination for us.) In metamorphosis, the shift is from one form to another without passing via meaning. In poetry, from one sign to another without passing via the reference. The collapsing of distances, of intervening spaces, always produces a kind of intoxication. What does speed itself mean to us if not the fact of going from one place to another without traversing time, from one moment to another without passing via duration and movement? Speed is marvellous: time alone is wearisome.

On August 3, 2012, the fifteenth day of the government offensive, rebels in the city said they were desperately low on ammunition and expressed dismay that the international community had not reacted when a huge massacre could be coming. Again, Libya was the example. Gadhafi threatened to overrun Benghazi and when he tried to do it, NATO started bombing. Now in Syria, Assad was threatening to crush the opposition in Aleppo and had already started doing it, but Washington’s reaction was only hand-wringing. In my conversations with rebels it was clear they were becoming increasingly disheartened and desperate. (The rebels would usually communicate with each other on Skype, blending in with the billions of people using the Internet instead of going through cell-phone towers.) The United States was apparently still skittish about sending in arms because it feared they would end up in the hands of Islamic extremists, but that, like so many unintended consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this stage the rebels were numerous, strong, motivated, and moderate and I made that clear in my reports on the air.

How much will you change?” Nella asked, uneasy. “Oh, not too much. Enough so that your signature won’t match the bots’ programming. Outwardly, you’ll never know the difference. Unless, of course, you’d like me to make some modifications.” She ran an eye up and down Nella, like a dress designer trying to decide where to put more pleats or frills. Rio’s arms tightened around her. “Don’t you dare change a thing. She’s perfect the way she is.” Nella’s face heated. “Not really.” “You don’t believe me?” Rio said, his voice taking on a dangerous note. “You’re very flattering,” she said. His playfulness vanished. “Flattering? You mean I’m lying?” “I didn’t say that. I . . .” He confused her. All her life Nella had been taught to be banally polite, to have the correct remark for the correct person at the correct time, always. Everything she said to Rio seemed to provoke a reaction opposite of what she’d been taught to expect. But then, Rio was nothing like any male— any human being— Nella had ever met before. He did nothing as expected. Maybe that was part of his attraction— his unpredictability. Abruptly, Rio spun Nella around and lifted her over his shoulder. She squeaked in surprise as her world went upside down, too startled to do anything but gape at his tight, leather-clad buttocks. “You’re still having a problem with trust,” he said. “One I’m going to have to cure.” Planting his hand on her backside, Rio hauled Nella out of the room, completely ignoring her shout of protest.

In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.

Any relationship will have its difficulties, but sometimes those problems are indicators of deep-rooted problems that, if not addressed quickly, will poison your marriage. If any of the following red flags—caution signs—exist in your relationship, we recommend that you talk about the situation as soon as possible with a pastor, counselor or mentor. Part of this list was adapted by permission from Bob Phillips, author of How Can I Be Sure: A Pre-Marriage Inventory.1 You have a general uneasy feeling that something is wrong in your relationship. You find yourself arguing often with your fiancé(e). Your fiancé(e) seems irrationally angry and jealous whenever you interact with someone of the opposite sex. You avoid discussing certain subjects because you’re afraid of your fiancé(e)’s reaction. Your fiancé(e) finds it extremely difficult to express emotions, or is prone to extreme emotions (such as out-of-control anger or exaggerated fear). Or he/she swings back and forth between emotional extremes (such as being very happy one minute, then suddenly exhibiting extreme sadness the next). Your fiancé(e) displays controlling behavior. This means more than a desire to be in charge—it means your fiancé(e) seems to want to control every aspect of your life: your appearance, your lifestyle, your interactions with friends or family, and so on. Your fiancé(e) seems to manipulate you into doing what he or she wants. You are continuing the relationship because of fear—of hurting your fiancé(e), or of what he or she might do if you ended the relationship. Your fiancé(e) does not treat you with respect. He or she constantly criticizes you or talks sarcastically to you, even in public. Your fiancé(e) is unable to hold down a job, doesn’t take personal responsibility for losing a job, or frequently borrows money from you or from friends. Your fiancé(e) often talks about aches and pains, and you suspect some of these are imagined. He or she goes from doctor to doctor until finding someone who will agree that there is some type of illness. Your fiancé(e) is unable to resolve conflict. He or she cannot deal with constructive criticism, or never admits a mistake, or never asks for forgiveness. Your fiancé(e) is overly dependant on parents for finances, decision-making or emotional security. Your fiancé(e) is consistently dishonest and tries to keep you from learning about certain aspects of his or her life. Your fiancé(e) does not appear to recognize right from wrong, and rationalizes questionable behavior. Your fiancé(e) consistently avoids responsibility. Your fiancé(e) exhibits patterns of physical, emotional or sexual abuse toward you or others. Your fiancé(e) displays signs of drug or alcohol abuse: unexplained absences of missed dates, frequent car accidents, the smell of alcohol or strong odor of mouthwash, erratic behavior or emotional swings, physical signs such as red eyes, unkempt look, unexplained nervousness, and so on. Your fiancé(e) has displayed a sudden, dramatic change in lifestyle after you began dating. (He or she may be changing just to win you and will revert back to old habits after marriage.) Your fiancé(e) has trouble controlling anger. He or she uses anger as a weapon or as a means of winning arguments. You have a difficult time trusting your fiancé(e)—to fulfill responsibilities, to be truthful, to help in times of need, to make ethical decisions, and so on. Your fiancé(e) has a history of multiple serious relationships that have failed—a pattern of knowing how to begin a relationship but not knowing how to keep one growing. Look over this list. Do any of these red flags apply to your relationship? If so, we recommend you talk about the situation as soon as possible with a pastor, counselor or mentor.